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Monday, March 24, 2014

The court jester is a universal character. He can be found
in ancient Rome and in China, in Renaissance Europe and in czarist Russia, at
the courts of the Middle East and in classical Sanskrit plays of ancient India.
Although there were a few known female jesters, historical studies show that
the majority of jesters were men. The most famous female court jesters were
Astaude du Puy, who worked for Queen Henrietta Maria (1609–1669), wife of
Charles I of France, and La Jardinière, who worked for the queen dowager,
Catherine de Médicis. Throughout history, the best jesters would acquire
legendary reputations, becoming celebrated for their sharp tongues and quick
wit. Their role was more than pure amusement; they were the original “truth
tellers,” whose job was to mock typical human vices of vanity, venality,
snobbery, petulance, laziness, carpetbaggery, and fatuity. The court jesters
aimed their humor at the usual targets: religion and the hypocrisy of its authority
figures; pompous and self-serving scholars and grandiloquent artists; knavish
and sycophantic court officials; and indolent, mercurial, or incompetent rulers.
In Europe, the court jester would be called fool,
buffoon, clown, jongleur, jogleor, joculator, stultor, scurra, fou, histrio,
morion, among many other names. He was an essential fixture of the royal
courts and master castles.

The typical medieval or Renaissance jester was an outsider
shunned by society for one reason or another. His marginal position put him outside
the social framework, but his alienation only sharpened his insight into human
nature. Jesters came from a range of backgrounds, from nonconformist university
dropouts to excommunicated monks. In Russia, for example, jesters “were
generally selected from among the older and uglier of the serf-servants, and
the older the fool or she-fool was, the droller they were supposed and expected
to be. The fool had the right to sit at table with his master, and say whatever
came into his head”(Otto, 1–2). Giving
offense to the king, lèse-majesté, has been a grave crime throughout
history, and it was severely punished, including with death. Court jesters, however,
often were granted “comic dispensation,” a “Freedom from all Constraint.” They
could say anything about anyone, including the king. The jester kept the master
in check, giving him an honest assessment of his decisions, character, and actions.
Sometimes jesters and their masters developed a strong bond and became very
protective of each other. Complimenting the fool was seen as complimenting the
master. In 1047, a jester named Gollet warned his master, Duke William of Normandy,
of a plot. He did so in rhyme, while pounding on the duke’s door. King Charles V of France buried his two
jesters in lavish monuments to pay homage to their wisdom and wit (Doran, 291).
Shakespeare’s most iconic scene is that of Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick,
his beloved childhood jester, while lamenting his untimely death: “Alas, Poor
Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

The jester was often represented as the only wise man of
the company. Like Feste in Shakespeare’s
TwelfthNight, he frequently spoke in improvised rhymes and sophisticated
riddles, ensuring that the true meaning of his words remained obscure and
beyond the understanding of common folk. The revered Polish jester Stańczyk (1480–1560), for example, was
considered the most politically astute man of his era, able to predict the
unfavorable turn of Polish history. Employed by three kings, Alexander, Sigmund
the Old, and Sigmund Augustus, Stańczyk is known as a highly intelligent
political philosopher who often spoke truth to power. In the most famous
portrait of Stańczyk, by Jan Matejko, the jester, his head hanging low, is the
only person at the court concerned about the news of Russians capturing the
city of Smolensk in 1514. In Polish literature, Stańczyk is often perceived as
the symbolic conscience of the nation. For the jester, however, no matter how
exceptional and talented he was, the price of the freedom to say anything was
social exclusion. The jester could never be promoted and could never fully
participate in the social life of the court. He remained on the margins, an astute
observer and biting commenter on social conventions and human follies. Likewise,
a court jester was a slave who could never break free of his job; only the
royal word could release him.

Many of the jesters were disabled: hunchbacks like
Rigoletto, dwarfs, or otherwise handicapped. Since they were ostracized by
society, the disabled marginal position offered them an unparalleled vantage
point from which to peer into its faults and the necessary detachment from
life’s passions, a vital quality in a brilliant jester. In medieval and Renaissance
Europe dwarf jesters were so popular that the practice of artificially stunting
children became common to keep up with demand. According to documents from 1670,
dwarfs could be artificially made by “anointing babies’ spines with the grease
of bats, moles, and dormice.” Other prescriptions advised various medicaments such
as “the aptly named dwarf elder, knotgrass, and daisy juice and roots mixed
with milk to stunt growth” (Otto, 29). Often children were kidnapped and turned
into “artificial dwarfs” to be sold as court jesters. In Italy and Spain the
practice was so widespread that the kidnappers had their own term, comprachicos, “child-buyers.” In
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1600), Lysander talks about it: “Get you gone, you dwarf; / You minimus, of
hindering knot-grass made; / You bead, you accorn!” The Hindu book of
dramaturgy, Natyasastra, advises that
the best court jesters should be both dwarfs and hunchbacked. The desire to
keep dwarfs and other “freaks” at the courts was almost universally viewed as a
way to contain their magical capacity for evil, “an instinctive fear and distaste developing into the need both to control
and appease. It did not stem from a recognition of their humanity” (Whitehead).
It was believed that the touch of a dwarf could cure and fend off illness.
Likewise, “the stinging wit of the jester belongs to the same family of
beliefs: his bitter medicine could purge ill humour, his sharp points could
draw out bad blood” (Whitehead).

Although the majority of court jesters were picked for
their intelligence and quick wit, some who were developmentally challenged,
with Down syndrome or autism, were used for amusement, as their antics were considered
a great source of entertainment. Since they could not control their impulses
they were considered truth-tellers, contributing to the later perception of
madness as a source of truth. In Madness
and Civilization (1988), the French philosopher Michel Foucault notes that
madness was historically thought to “bring to light the real problem, which can
then be truly resolved” (33). Standing outside of the ethical and hierarchical order
of the court, the mentally challenged jesters represented a purging of social
consciousness. They were given leeway to point out the follies of the social
and political structures. Representing the mad as truth-bearers was also part of
theatrical convention, as Guilfoyle (1980) notes: “Characters who go mad in
renaissance drama frequently speak more truth, and deeper truth than when sane”
(6). Disabled court jesters served an important function: “to correct
over-evaluation, [and to call] for a revaluation of values” (Feibleman, 421–32).

RIGOLETTO: TRIBOULET, QUASIMODO, AND KING LEAR

Like many other historical court jesters, Verdi’s Rigoletto
is hunchbacked. Since his job is to mock everyone at the court for the
amusement of the Duke, he is not well liked by the courtiers. The figure of
Rigoletto is based on the real-life jester Triboulet (1479–1536), who suffered
from microcephaly, a neurodevelopmental disorder, and who served kings Louis
XII and Francis I of France. He was deformed in appearance: “His bowed back,
his short and twisted legs, his long and hanging arms, amused the ladies, who
contemplated him as if he had been a monkey or a paroquet” (Doran, 305). According
to legend, Triboulet was not well liked at court, and he was often physically
abused. When he complained to King Francis I of a nobleman who had threatened
to beat him to death, the king replied, “If he does, I will hang him a quarter of
an hour afterward.” “Ah, Sir!”—responded Triboulet—“couldn’t you contrive to
hang him a quarter of an hour previously?” When he was about to be beaten by a
group of pages for insulting them, Triboulet also responded in rhyme. It didn’t
save him, though, and eventually he was beaten. He recovered soon enough to
become one of France’s most celebrated jesters.

Triboulet made his first literary appearance in François
Rabelais’s Pantagruelian chronicles. In
Victor Hugo’s 1832 play Le Roi s’Amuse
(The King Amuses Himself), on which Verdi’s Rigoletto
is based, Triboulet is malicious and mean-spirited. He spares no one and is equally
cruel to each courtier who comes his way. Rejected by the world, he shows
genuine emotions only toward his lone and pure daughter. In writing the play,
Hugo included some elements from his famous novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, published in 1831, modeling his
Triboulet on Quasimodo, the title character of the novel. Hugo described Quasimodo
as a tortured and abused man who “found around him only hatred.” Eventually, in
response to the world’s malice, “he adopted it. He armed himself with the
weapons that had wounded him.” Upon reading Hugo’s Le Roi s’Amuse, Verdi wrote in a letter to a friend that the story
“is the greatest subject and perhaps the greatest drama of modern times.
Triboulet is a creation worthy of Shakespeare!”He “is one of the greatest creations that the theatre of all countries
and all times can boast.” At that time, Verdi considered composing music for Shakespeare’s
King Lear, but upon reading Hugo’s
play he abandoned the project, believing that the character Triboulet had even
greater dramatic potential as a blinded and grieving father. Thus, drawing on
all these influences, Verdi’s Rigoletto is a composite of four characters: the real-life
Triboulet, the Triboulet from Hugo’s play Le
Roi s’Amuse, Quasimodo, and King Lear. Likewise, Rigoletto’s name was
initially Triboletto, but eventually it became a blend of two words, “Triboulet”
and the French rigoler (to laugh).

Thursday, March 20, 2014

On February 13,
Boston Lyric Opera partnered with theFrench Cultural Center and Dante Alighieri Society of Massachusettsto present Le Roi s’Amuse and
Rigoletto: How Hugo and Verdi Shocked the Censors.Coro Dante conductor, Kevin
Galiè presented a lecture on Victor Hugo’s and Verdi’s struggle against censorship
in their respective works about the tragic court jester set in the decadent
courts of French and Italian royalty, respectively.French Cultural Center actors Mark Leuning
and Suzanne Pergal performed scenes in French from Hugo’s original play Le
Roi s’Amuse and BLO Artists Maggie
Finnegan, Omar Najmi, and James Myers performed the equivalent scenes and arias
from Verdi’s Rigoletto.The side-by-side scene performances showcased
how each interpretation critiqued the governmental powers in question.

Kevin Galièjoins In the Wings to share more about Verdi and Piave’s
subversion of Austrian censors before the premiere of Rigoletto.For
more production history on Rigoletto,
click here.

When Rigoletto
premiered in 1851, Italy was only nine short years away from its Risorgimento – its great civil war of
unification – which ironically happened at the same time as the American Civil
War (1860-65). In the censorship of Rigoletto,
it’s possible that Verdi and Piave were only driven to put in even more
esoteric and subtle references and incitements to the current state of the
peoples of the Italian peninsula.There was
no “country” at the time – Italy was a series of kingdoms, including the
Vatican papal states that were all of central Italy.

Verdi had many censors, including the French, the
Austrians, the Italians, and the Pope.Verdi,
in turn censored his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, always asking for fewer
words.Victor Hugo – who wrote the play Le Roi s’Amuse, upon which Rigoletto was based – was looking to
ridicule with farce and mockery.Hugo’s
King is modeled after Francis the First (c. 1520), but France’s king in 1832,
when Le Roi s’Amuse was premiered,
was Louis-Phillippe, and his administration took direct offense.Famously, Le
Roi s’Amuse was suppressed in 1832, two years after the 1830 French Charter
of Abolition of Censorship, which stated: “The French have the right to
publish; censorship must never be re-established.”Piave and Verdi were looking to ridicule with
cutting tragedy and no-holds-barred obscenity and obscene inference.Their Duke is modeled after Vincenzo Gonzaga
(1562-1612), the Duke of Mantua.

The Austrian censor De Gorzkowski in December of
1850 referred to Piave’s libretto as “a repugnant immorality and obscene
triviality.”In his article “Due facce di Rigoletto,” Michele Girardi
names six points of agreement for the censors, described as “Catolicissimi.”

·The
action of the drama must be transported from the French court to an independent
ducal of Bourgogne, Normandy, or a small Italian principality in the Farnese
court.

·The
original character types of Hugo may be conserved, changing the names according
to the situation of the time period.

·The
scene must be avoided in which Francis I, king of France, (in Rigoletto, the Duke of Bourgogne)
declares resolutely to profit from the key to Gilda’s room.Another scene must be substituted, conserving
decency without diminishing the interest of the drama.

·At
the lovers’ meeting in the tavern, the Duke arrives because of a trick, not
intentionally.The hunchback Triboulet
is renamed Rigoletto, and the opera is renamed Rigoletto.

·At
the appearance of the sack containing the daughter of Rigoletto, Verdi is
allowed to make whatever modifications necessary.

·With
the above modifications, Verdi doesn’t need to open the opera before February 28
or March 1 (a tight window before Ash Wednesday, 1851).

Piave and Verdi were censored, but it backfired. By
a deft rewriting of allusion, inference, and metaphor, they created an opera
that the Italian native-speakers would “get” (a message that the Risorgimento was coming and here are the
reasons), but that would go right over the heads of the occupying “German-speakers.”

I can’t presume to know what exactly was in Verdi’s and
Piave’s minds when they had to deal with the censors and telling this story, but
being both a musician and an Italian speaker, living there four months a year
has given me a chance to crawl inside the Verdian-Italian mentality, albeit 150
years later, and to understand the very subtle shades of meaning I believe lie
in this redacted, changed, partially butchered version of Piave’s original. In
short, I believe the Hugo play was a straight-out farce criticizing the King of
France, while in their version Piave and Verdi were forced to make lemonade
when given the lemons of censorship. There are many fantastically key moments
in this opera that are only fleetingly alluded to, or that happen only by
deduction or inference.

Piave’s libretto wastes no time. Instead of drawing
the audience gradually into the action, as does Hugo’s Le Roi s’Amuse, at every turn from beginning to end Piave gets
right to the obscene, scathing review of nobility. Verdi does the same, opening
the opera by heralding a clean unison C or “do,” on the brass, which is then
polluted by the angry and dirty diminished seventh chord. In fact, the first
two measures of the opera, musically, are a metaphor for the entire work: a
repeated C/”do”—arguably the cleanest, purest note, represented by Gilda, or in
my opinion the Italian character, polluted only by the minority of Italians in
1851 who may have stained the nobility.Then
the note is crashed, violated, put into a sack by the diminished seventh chord
– the C is in the diminished chord, but at the bottom of the chord – the way
Gilda ends up dead in a sack.And the
Italian people end up under the yoke of Austria (with the Vatican in the
middle, and the Kingdom of the two Sicilys in the south).This musical ability to paint the action is
not something that can be done in a spoken play; many things that are not said with words in Rigoletto are said with music.

The opera is full of double meanings and
outrageously obscene references – almost too much to be mentioned here. It is impossible to know completely how these
phrases fell upon the patriotically inclined Italian in 1851; I think they were
just subtle enough for the Austrian bilingual listeners to understand them, but
for the Italian listeners to feel them strike their hearts and ring the bell of
the coming unification.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Magda Romanska, BLO Dramaturg and visiting associate
professor at Harvard University, talks to Professor David Rosen about Verdi’s Rigoletto.
Professor Rosen is a world-renowned musicologist, a leading expert on Verdi,
and professor emeritus of Music at Cornell University.Professor Rosen was responsible for the
critical edition of Verdi's Messa da Requiem (published in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi) and the Cambridge Music Handbook on Verdi’s requiem. He also coauthored a volume dedicated to thedisposizione scenica of
Verdi'sUn Ballo in Maschera.Professor
Rosen discovered in the Paris Bibliothèque de l’Opéra a passage in Verdi's
manuscript score for Don Carlos which
had had to be cut in order to ensure that the opera's premiere would finish
before midnight. Professor Rosen was one of the first scholars to study the contemporary
staging manuals (disposizioni
scenicheorlivrets de mise en
scène) and other sources that help
us reconstruct the visual aspects of 19th-century opera.

MR:One
of the essential themes of Victor Hugo’s Le
Roi s’Amuse (The King Amuses Himself), and Verdi’s Rigoletto is the father’s curse. As Victor Hugo’s put it: “[M. de Saint-Vallier—Monterone in Verdi’s
opera], from whom the king has taken his daughter, is jeered at and insulted by
Triboulet [Rigoletto].The father raises
his arm and curses Triboulet.From that
[action] the entire play develops.The
real subject of the drama is the curse of M. de Saint-Vallier.” Can
you tell us how the curse functions in Hugo’s play, and in Verdi’s opera? How
it is framed by the musical structure of the opera?

DR: There are two different recurring passages of music associated with the
curse: a meditative brooding one, and one expressed in a thunderclap of
recognition when the curse strikes home.The music associated with the meditative version is the first thing
heard in the opera: a solo trumpet and trombone intone the rhythm of the phrase
“Quel vecchio maledivami” (“That old man cursed me”), leading into a striking
harmonic progression.As in act 2 of the
play,Rigoletto recalls the curse – “that
old man cursed me” – four times in the
second tableau of act 1: before his duet
with Sparafucile, twice in the extended recitative monologue that follows, and
again at the beginning of the finale that culminates in the abduction of his
daughter, Gilda. These are the last
appearances of the meditative curse theme in the opera.

When Rigoletto
realizes that the courtiers have abducted not Ceprano’s wife but his own
daughter, he tears his hair, then cries, “Ah!...la maledizione!!” (“Lamalediction!” in the play) to a harshly dissonant cadence in the minor mode,
and he faints as the lowest instruments in the orchestra furiously play rapid
descending chromatic scales.

In the theater most
curses unfailingly strike their mark, but at the end of act 2 of Verdi’s opera,Monterone, led off to prison, stops to
address a portrait of the Duke: “Since you were cursed by me in vain, no
thunderbolt or blade striking your breast, you will live happily yet, O Duke.”Rigoletto responds, “No, old man, you are
wrong... You will have an avenger.”(The
situation comes straight from the play, although in the opera, as with the
initial curse in act 1, rather than ending the act the line triggers a
concluding operatic “number,” here the cabaletta of the Gilda/Rigoletto
duet.)By undoing our expectations that
the curse on the Duke will be fulfilled, Monterone has in effect canceled that
curse.And Rigoletto seems to be
confident at this point that Monterone’s curse upon him has already been
fulfilled by the abduction and seduction of his daughter; however, as Hugo says
in his preface, “[Triboulet’s] punishment does not stop halfway.”

MR: How does the ending of Rigoletto compare to Verdi’s other
operas, and how should we read it?

DR: The end of the opera follows a three-stage procedure that Verdi used in
many of his operas.The initial stage
prepares the death scene, either by inflicting the mortal wound or by
announcing that the designated victim is dying from poison or – in La Traviata – disease.The second stage is a slow set piece in which
the victim dies, surrounded by grieving friends, relatives, and perhaps even
former enemies.These ensembles are
consolatory, and the death agony is hardly ever disturbed by any expression of
rancor or gloating.They are typically
in keys with many flats (five in Rigoletto)
and are either in the major mode throughout, or, as in the case of Rigoletto, begin in the minor mode but
soon move to the major mode.In the
third stage, after the character dies, there is a sudden turn to the minor mode
and a fast tempo unfolding the final cadence in a single span.This often encompasses a further dramatic
event, perhaps the death of a second principal character, the tenor (as in Il Corsaro, Luisa Miller, Il Trovatore);
or a revelation embodied in a “punch line,”; such as Azucena’s “Egli era tuo
fratello!” informing the Count that he has justexecuted his own brother in Il Trovatore,
or in Rigoletto, of course, “Ah! la
maledizione!”

In Rigoletto, the ending is connected to
the curse; it is its natural resolution, supported by the music.Both the staging – Rigoletto tears his hair
and falls, now on Gilda’s body – and the music – the same harmonic progression
and descending chromatic scales in the same scoring as before – clearly link
this moment with Rigoletto’s recollection of the curse occasioned by Gilda’s
abduction precisely two acts earlier.Indeed, in Verdi’s sketches the vocal line in the two passages was
identical as well (mi – re – do), though in the final version he adjusted the
first of the two passages, perhaps to bring it down to a more comfortable range
for the baritone.In the opera, then,
the music, text, and staging all collude in representing Gilda’s abduction and,
later, her death as parallel fulfillments of the curse.

MR: What is the major difference between
Victor Hugo’s treatment of the ending and the curse in his play, and Verdi’s Rigoletto? What is at stake in their different versions?

DR:InHugo’s play, after a doctor has coldly pronounced Blanche dead,
Triboulet does not recall the curse
but closes the play on the line “J’ai tué mon enfant!J’ai tué mon enfant!” [I killed my child!] If “the real subject of the drama is the curse
of M. de Saint-Vallier,” why does
Hugo fail to refer to it here? There are psychological,
even moral issues at stake here. Rigoletto views the curse as an external,
almost random, force, rather like Monterone’s thunderbolt or blade that has
struck him because of the curse.True
enough, Verdi and Piave do follow the play in giving Rigoletto the line, “She
herself was struck by the arrow of my just revenge [giustavendetta]” (a line
the Roman censors, when the opera was performed there, altered to “stupid revenge”
[stolta vendetta] in an attempt to
impart some sense of remorse to the character and to characterize “vendetta” negatively).But Rigoletto never realizes that it is
through his own misdeeds that Monterone’s curse takes effect.Rigoletto himself became the author of his
own punishment: his attempt to abduct Ceprano’s wife brought about the
abduction of his daughter, his attempt to kill the Duke, her death.Through a comforting moral blindness
Rigoletto is spared that cruel realization that crushes Triboulet at the end of
Hugo’s tragedy.Rigoletto never comes to
acknowledge that he himself, not an impersonal force impelled by the curse, is
the direct cause of his daughter’s death.One might criticize the opera for its failure to compel Rigoletto to
accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions, for supporting his
comfortable view that he is the passive victim of Monterone’s curse.But another critical move is available: to
claim that the opera reveals and diagnoses Rigoletto’s moral blindness, without
endorsing it.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

BLO’s
version of Rigoletto returns the opera to its original historical
context. The dramatic structure of the story is framed by two necessary
conditions: the world in which a ruler has absolute power over life and death,
and a world in which the curse of a father is to be believed and feared. Verdi
was convinced that for the plot to make sense the Duke must be a lecher with
power and without conscience. “The Duke must absolutely be a libertine; without
that there can be no justification for Rigoletto's fear of his daughter’s leaving,”
Verdi wrote in a letter to a friend. Moving the production from Paris to a
smaller city in Italy, Verdi reinforced the idea of a claustrophobic space
where no one can escape the fickle will of its ruler. The Duke, although acting
without concern or remorse, is never punished, and this lack of poetic justice
illuminates the city’s distorted moral code.

Our
production captures metaphorically that idea of the city of Mantua, a place
enclosed by the dark brick wall that illustrates its hidden, unscrupulous, dark
side. Chronologically, the plot moves back and forth between the open, public
place of the Duke’s court to the secret spaces of the city's underworld:
Rigoletto’s house, where he hides away his daughter, and the tavern where he
plots the Duke’s assassination. Likewise, our production uses a divided stage
to represent the two opposing realms of Mantua’s society, the public world of
the Duke’s omnipotent decadence and the private, hidden realm of intimate
affairs, which nonetheless remains in his powerful, omnipresent grip. Above the
dark brick wall, we see the model of a city made of white marble. The model is
based on a painting by Piero della Francesca (1415–92) of an ideal city, a
common theme of the Renaissance era. In the painting everything is spotless,
open, and transparent. The model hovers over a dark pit in which the human
passions of love, lust, and revenge fuel the workings of the real city. The
divided stage also represents the two sides of Rigoletto: the ugly, vicious
face he dons at court, and the gentle, loving side he shows to his daughter.
The image of Rigoletto’s two faces, grotesque and tender, follows Verdi’s
intention: “To me there is something really fine in representing on stage this
character outwardly so ugly and ridiculous, inwardly so impassioned and full of
love,” Verdi wrote about the jester.

The
second necessary component of the dramatic structure of Verdi’s opera is the
impact and power of the father’s curse on the Duke and Rigoletto. The curse is
thrown by a courtier whose daughter was abducted and seduced by the Duke, with
Rigoletto goading him on. When defending his play to the censors, Victor Hugo
wrote,

This
father whose daughter has been taken from him by the king is mocked and
insulted by Triboulet. The father raises his arms and curses Triboulet. The
whole play evolves from this. The true subject of the drama is the curse of
Monsieur de St-Vallier. Now observe; we are in the second act. On whom has this
curse fallen? On Triboulet the king’s buffoon? No, on Triboulet the man, who is
a father, who has a heart, and a daughter. He has nothing else but his daughter
in the whole world.

Verdi
follows Hugo’s concept, making the father’s curse on Rigoletto the central
pillar of the story. The original title of Rigoletto was, in fact, The
Curse (La Maledizione), and Verdi believed that the curse is the
axis around which the entire dramatic arc of the story revolves. “The whole
subject lives in that curse,” he wrote in a letter to his librettist, Francesco
Maria Piave, while the two were writing the opera. When under the threat of the
censor the text of the opera was reworked, a revision that undermined the power
of the curse, Verdi penned an impassioned letter to C.D. Marzari, the president
of the Teatro la Fenice, who had ordered the rewrites: “The old man’s curse, so
awesome and sublime in the original, here becomes ridiculous because the motive
that drives him to curse no longer has the same importance ... Without this
curse, what purpose, what meaning does the drama have?” Being himself a father,
and remembering the time he spent with his daughter’s mother as the only
happiness he has ever known, Rigoletto is horrified when another father on whom
he has inflicted unsurpassed misery has cursed him with all his heart. The
curse is a turning point for Rigoletto, a moment in which he begins
to unravel. Thus, our set represents Rigoletto’s breakdown. The erotic
Italian-style painting on the wall depicts Venus and Mars, one of the
most sumptuous subjects of Western mythology. In our production, however,
the painting is not straightforward; it is broken, fractured—like Rigoletto
himself. In order for the curse to remain the turning point of the story, to
assert its impact on poor Rigoletto, it has to live in the world in which it is
believable and authentic, and such was the original world of Verdi’s powerful
opera.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Verdi’s Rigoletto is based on Victor Hugo’s
1832 play Le Roi S’amuse (The King Amuses Himself), which
centers on the excesses of a cynical and ruthless king who revels in the cruel
treatment of his courtiers, particularly his jester. The play was meant to
depict the story of Francis I of France (1494–1547) and his famous jester
Triboulet; however, the censors believed that it mocked France’s current king,
Louis-Philippe (1773–1850), and thus banned it after just one performance. In
response, Hugo sued the Théâtre Français, a move that turned him into a
celebrity, a defender of freedom of speech in France. Unfortunately, he lost
the suit and the play was banned for another 50 years. To avoid Hugo’s
perturbations with censors, Verdi moved the play to Mantua, and changed the
king to a duke. He also changed the title of the opera to La
Maledizione (The Curse) and eventually changed it again,
to Rigoletto. Both titles shifted the focus of the story from the
depravity of the master to the drama of his jester. The plot now focused on the
tragic story of Rigoletto, who is trapped in an impossible predicament and who
eventually suffers one of man’s most horrid fates.

When Rigoletto premiered in Italy in March
1851 at the Teatro la Fenice in Venice, the critical and popular response was
largely negative on account of the opera’s seeming “lack of morality”—a virginal
girl is seduced by a serial womanizer, whose life she saves by sacrificing her
own, leaving her grieving and crippled father in despair while the lecherous
villain walks away unscathed and unpunished. The lack of poetic justice at the
end of the story didn’t prevent the audiences from enjoying Verdi’s music,
however, and the opera quickly overcame its initial setbacks. By 1852 Rigoletto was
showing in all major Italian cities, and soon enough it was performed all over
the world, from Alexandria to Constantinople to Montevideo.

In the United States, the reception of Rigoletto was
also not without stumbles, as audiences’ and critics’ distaste for what they
perceived to be the story’s amoral message seemed at first insurmountable. When
the opera premiered on February 19, 1855, at New York’s Academy of Music, Albion,
the influential weekly journal, wrote that “rumors prejudicial to the morals
of Rigoletto had been most freely circulated throughout the
city, inducing many who would otherwise gladly have heard the new opera, to
bide their time until the press should have pronounced its dictum upon the
nature of the plot.” After the opening, the critics weren’t much kinder, one
calling it “not one of Verdi’s best.” The Times noted that
“there is no justice, poetic or otherwise; nothing but horrors, horrors.”
Following the reviews, the audiences dwindled, and the show was closed after
the fifth performance.

Despite these initial setbacks, however, as in Italy, people
in the United States eventually accepted the ethical implications of the plot
and began enjoying the music. The 1861 revival in New York City brought some
accolades, with the Herald calling Rigoletto “one
of Verdi’s very best works—never sufficiently appreciated here.” The Sunday
Mercury, however, called it “immoral” and argued that “no respectable
member of the fair sex could patronize [the opera] without a sacrifice of both
taste and modesty. [. . .] No decent citizen could wish to see it beside his
wife or daughter.” The opera’s producer, Max Meretzek, sued the newspaper for
libel, arguing that the story is not at all immoral because the true villain is
not the Duke but Rigoletto, who is indeed punished at the end of the story.
Meretzek won the suit, and the jury awarded him $1,000 in restitution.

Today, Rigoletto is one of the most often
performed and most beloved operas. In the last two decades, a number of
productions have changed the setting of Rigoletto: to New York
City’s Little Italy of the 1950s, to The Planet of the Apes, to
Mussolini’s fascist Italy, and to an Italian casino in 1960s Las Vegas, among
others.